APS March Meeting 2023 recommendations for physics education and related contents

This is a short post containing sessions that I recommend if you are interested in physics education, outreach, etc.:

Key messages of a short conference presentation on physics education

What sort of messages do I want to convey in a ten-minute presentation? I have started thinking about this question due to my upcoming talk at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Las Vegas. For the first time in my life, I will give a conference presentation on an education-related topic instead of rather technical condensed matter physics contents. Since the presentation time is so short, I think that it is worth spending some time to think about the key messages. In my talk I will focus on the incorporation of computational methods into physics courses by discussing a successful realization of micromagnetic simulation group projects in an elective magnetism class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, together with Professor Axel Hoffmann.

Weekend food for thought

Let me share a few random points as weekend food for thought: 

Media hypes affecting physics teaching and a crisis in particle physics?

Today, I would like to share with the readers two interesting, physics education-related topics that have attracted my interest over the course of the last few days. 

Five ways of improving the learning experience for physics students

Prior to launching this blog I had written down numerous bullet points related to topics in physics teaching that I would deem important. In today's post, based on five selected points I would like to discuss how we could improve the learning experience for physics students by implementing changes in the physics curriculum, course syllabi, and teaching methods. Clearly, most the ideas can be traced back to my time as a postdoctoral research in the United States. 

Artificial intelligence and other novel technologies in physics education

We are living in a time of significant technological advances and breakthroughs. Increasing computational power facilitates extensive numerical simulations of material physics, astronomical objects such as black holes, weather and climate phenomena, and the dynamics of a global pandemic that we have been going through for a couple of years. Artificial intelligence based chatbots such as ChatGPT by OpenAI appear to have a disruptive impact on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Data science and big data are more established concepts that have already found their way into academic research as well as industrial applications. Quantum computing and brain-inspired computer chips are further examples of potentially disruptive technologies. Virtual reality and the so-called metaverse are expected to become increasingly sophisticated and relevant, too. 

Teaching and communicating magnetism

This is a reprint of an article that I have written for the IEEE Magnetics Society Newsletter (November 2022 issue, edited by Jia Yan Law). Please do check out the Newsletter if you are interested in contents related to magnetism, technology, activities of the Magnetics Society as well as announcements of conferences, awards and events.

Nowadays, the majority of people are likely to encounter magnetism in their everyday lives, be it by simply seeing the magnets on their refrigerator door, using magnetized screwdrivers, navigating with a compass, swiping a credit card, undergoing an MRI scan, or saving an image file on their computer's magnetic hard drive. Of course, in the IEEE Magnetics Society, we have a much closer and more professional relationship with the world of magnetism, for instance, by conducting fundamental research or driving the evolution of magnetism-based technologies. This places us in an optimal situation to teaching and communication outreach in the field of magnetism!

12 questions every physics department should ask themselves

Here are 12 questions that every physics department should ask themselves in regard to teaching and the educational curriculum: 

Having the right mindset for a physics degree

Recently, I had a nice discussion with a colleague about the mindset of undergraduate physics freshmen (i.e., first-year) students. This conversation has inspired today's blogpost on the very same topic. 

Many things are different at a university as compared to high schools. Physics students oftentimes feel overwhelmed during their first semesters at college. Professors are rushing through the course material, homework is due every week in multiple classes, and a major part of the fellow students appear to be geniuses. They seem to grasp even complex contents very quickly, do not need to spend much time on their homework and ask a lot of smart questions during the lectures. One might get the impression that they do not need to work hard to pass exams and achieve their goals. These are only a few examples of the mindset that many students tend to develop. I would like to argue that such thoughts are largely unfounded and are making life unnecessarily harder for many students.

Thoughts and conversations on teaching during a scientific conference

Last week, I attended the annual conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) which took place in Minneapolis (United States). While the central topics of this conference were all related to cutting-edge research in the field of magnetism, I still had the chance to think and talk about teaching physics and materials science. Therefore, in today’s blogpost, I would like to touch on a few of my thoughts and conversations.